About Me

I desire a simple yet beautiful life reflected in William Wordsworth's poem. Being quirky, I'll only drink tea from pretty, china teacups and coffee from mugs preferring to wrap my hand around a beautifully, hand-potted mug. As a wife and mother of 4 beautiful sons, I'm continually leaning on the One who is the Author of all BEAUTY & GRACE.

Waste not…

Today is the day after the grand Easter celebration dinner. The ham was bountiful and smelled amazing. The potatoes, caesar salad (my brother-in-law’s specialty!) and deviled eggs filled every empty spot in your belly, and the beehive-shaped honey cake and/or cherry pie and/or flour-less chocolate torte provided just a touch of sweet to round of the Resurrection Day feast! Oh, the memories! Oh, the left-overs!

My tips for Easter dinner left-overs:

Ham

As we speak, I have two ham & cheese quiches in the oven – yum!

Your family will tire of ham left-overs so chop up the ham and freeze in quart-size baggies.

Find a good recipe for ham and bean soup. Use the ham bone for a great stock, and freeze left-over soup in individual containers for lunches.

Mashed potatoes

Throw together canned salmon, mashed potatoes, chives and an egg. Fry as you would pancakes for a tasty and nutritional meal. Serve with steamed broccoli for dinner or fruit for breakfast.

Make potato bread. I found an older recipe last summer for potato cinnamon rolls printed in the More with Less cookbook. The recipe made over 100 rolls. I froze many, many of them; we had cinnamon rolls for months! We also gave them as food gifts and contributed a few dozen to a bake sale. If anyone in our family mentions potato cinnamon rolls, we all chuckle at the memory.

Deviled eggs

Well, if I had any left, I would just eat them…

Challah bread

I am fascinated by this Jewish sabbath bread (I’ll have to save that for a future blog…)! It is a rich, egg-based bread like a brioche. I find it dries out pretty fast, but it makes amazing French toast.

Recently, I found a crock-pot recipe for bread pudding. This would be the perfect bread to experiment with the recipe.

Challah bread makes wonderful bread crumbs, too.

Peeps

This year we are over-run with those mini marshmallow minions. My thought (and I haven’t tried it, yet) is to stuff those birds with a chocolate egg or two (since they are plenteous as well), place between two graham crackers and throw in the microwave (the oven works too). Sounds rather extreme, doesn’t it?

Love to hear your solutions to the left-over dilemma…

Lazy people don’t even cook the game they catch, but the diligent make use of everything they find. Proverbs 12:27 (NLT)

Father God, Give us diligent hands so that everything we do prospers according to Your word (Proverbs 10:4). Amen

To begin, there shouldn’t be leftover Peeps. There shouldn’t be ANY Peeps…ever. Peeps are evil, squishy aliens that came here in 1953. They landed in southern California and slowly, methodically, took over a town. That town’s name today: Loma Linda.

Anyone even having contact with Peeps or Loma Linda should have a full battery of tests….just to make sure. Make sure of what, you ask? Honestly, I can’t even begin to outline the “what.”

Thanks for your comment and thanks so much for visiting. I feel like this is an important issue, too. We have a long way to go to compete with our grandmothers (or great-grandmothers). They were master’s at frugal living! But with every step, we create change. I’m all about those baby steps…